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Why aren't you seeing how many Wisconsin residents recovered from coronavirus? Because 'it would be a guess,' state says.

As the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Wisconsin keeps growing, there's a number that everyone would like to see growing along with it: those who have recovered from the virus.

But among the data that the state Department of Health Services shares daily — which now includes negative tests, positive tests, hospitalizations and deaths — the number of recovered cases isn't reported, nor is it collected in the first place.

"If we presented numbers on how many people had recovered, it would be a guess," chief medical officer Ryan Westergaard said in a Facebook Live Q&A on Thursday. "We don't like sharing guesses."

Wisconsin's first coronavirus patient, reported Feb. 5, took nearly the entire month to meet the Centers for Disease Control's early guidance for having "recovered" from the virus: no symptoms and two negative tests.

But with a nationwide testing shortage, the CDC has acknowledged not everyone will get a test, much less two subsequent tests to deem them no longer infected.

New CDC guidelines for those who haven't been tested say you may leave home isolation if you've had no fever for 72 hours, other symptoms have subsided and at least seven days have passed since symptoms first appeared.

If that's the case, then, health officials might turn to whether a patient is no longer isolated as a sign of recovery. But DHS only has "sporadic" data on who is released from isolation, Miller said, depending on whether the local health department can submit that information into the state's disease surveillance system.

"We're looking at ways we can improve this data, but overall it is not being reported to us," Miller said.

And even looking at the number of people who are no longer isolated may not paint the full picture, because of all those who never get sick enough to report their illness to their local health department in the first place. They may recover, but the state will never know about it.

Some states have elected to track the number of patients who have recovered from the virus, including Minnesota. A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health did not respond to a question about how they do so.

Contact Madeline Heim at 920-996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @madeline_heim.